


Casualties

by samidha



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: spnquotefic, Gen, POV Sam Winchester, Season/Series 05-06 Hiatus, Written Without S6 Spoilers at the time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-10
Updated: 2010-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-14 12:55:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11783589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samidha/pseuds/samidha
Summary: Prompt: Dean: But, Sam, some guy's dead because of me. - Faith





	Casualties

Sam stands in the tree-line bordering the property, watching Dean in the window, his hand in hers. He watches Ben, a kid he never really got to know at all. A kid who is now Dean’s responsibility.

That keeps Sam ducking behind trees and stealing covert looks the same as any of his other reasons. And he has other reasons.

He watches this little slice of life, a shelter from the storm that came and went, leaving them to find some kind of whole together. And if he sees Dean drinking, the drinks are well-earned. If he sees his brother frustrated, on the verge of tears, that’s well earned too.

So Sam lets go, and he doesn’t mourn. He just lets go.

They averted the apocalypse, but that doesn’t mean there were no casualties. Sam keeps count of those. He counts Ellen and Jo and Ash and Isaac, Jim and his father and Caleb, all soldiers falling to the same force, in the end. Hell, he counts Andy and Scott and Max, Lily and Jake, too. He runs the tally through his head. But there are more than that. More than just the hunters and the hunted. The civilians get counted too. Five hundred when the middle of Chicago was leveled in a freak earthquake, two hundred in the Twin Cities in a building collapse, ten in Minnesota in a freak house fire that he would almost know who to blame for if Azazel were not a relegated to a bad memory.

Dean’s hell had been physical torture, but his had been remembering. Remembering all the could-have-beens, the near misses, every little mistake. He remembered them and he counted them and they left marks in his soul, tally marks until his soul was full of them, flayed open to reveal his soft underbelly, the part of him who had just been Sam Winchester, mortal boy. They flayed him with knowledge, what he used to prize so dearly. Knowledge as power... But whose power? Certainly not his.

When Sam climbed from the crater and breathed real air again, he knew the exact number of innocent lives lost since they started on this journey. Sam could count every last one of them.

And then he climbed out of Hell itself, and he stopped counting, but not before he had counted Lisa and the boy.

And so he stays within the treeline, and looks out of the corner of his eyes at everything, because time is coming soon now and it’s just a reflex.

Sam has already counted.


End file.
